Wednesday, 4 June 2014

Ukraine Is Not Just A Country Now – It’s An Idea

Something extraordinary happened in the frigid streets of
Kyiv during the last winter. Amid the cracked cobblestones and the snow-packed
bags of the barricades, between the lines of police and protesters, a national
idea began to crystallize.

That idea was soon articulated in the Maidan slogan “Ukraina
– tse Yevropa.” The grammar of this phrase is telling. It does not mean “Ukraine
is part of Europe” but “Ukraine IS Europe.” It is the idea that Ukraine not
only aspires to the principles that the EU is supposed to espouse – democracy,
the rule of law, fairness and equality – but that after a generation of
independence, these principles (which indeed have long been understood and to some
extent practiced in the past in Ukraine) have now been sufficiently inculcated
in Ukrainian society for the country to finally shrug off the legacy of
Soviet-style government, and take its rightful place in the ranks of “normal”
European countries. It is the idea that Ukraine itself embodies “Europeanness.”

It is a powerful idea, and so, of course, a threatening one
to those who do not share it. Within Ukraine, it meets most resistance from the
people of the east, many of whom still yearn for the stability of the Soviet era.
Further to the east, in Russia, with its “managed democracy,” the idea is an anathema.
One of the core elements of this idea, the principle of the Maidan – that any
people have it within their power, without help from outside, to overthrow an
autocratic regime - is a very menacing one for those who love, and live by, authoritarianism.
That is why the Maidan movement is vilified in Moscow, and the Kyiv government is
branded fascist – the most frightful mark Moscow can brand a foe with, as the
Russian psyche still bears severe scars from the experience of its “Patriotic
War” against Nazi Germany.

Even in the West, there are some who also quibble at the
idea of Ukraine becoming a fully-fledged European state. Stuck with 19th
and 20th century geopolitical memes that insist that Ukraine was,
is, and will forever be a buffer state between Europe proper and Russia, they
want to embrace Ukraine’s European aspirations but at the same time keep the
country at arm’s length, fearing the Kremlin’s anger at interference in Russia’s
sphere of influence.

Such fears are overblown. In reality, Ukraine need be no
more of a buffer state than is Finland, or the Baltic countries – all of whom
share a border with Russia. Of course, Ukraine can never escape its geography,
but it can escape its history. It will always be neighbors with Russia, but it need
not in future be in its thrall, as it has been in centuries past. Proof of this
can be seen in the painful but rapid cleansing process the Ukrainian body
politic is currently undergoing. The criminal gang that ran the country from
2010 is on the run – the country’s fourth president will never be able to set
foot in Kyiv again, or so it is to be hoped. His Party of Regions has been
gutted, and its leaders in exile or in the sights of the prosecutor general. A
new, Western-oriented president has been elected with a convincing mandate. Ukraine,
in the space of just six months, has greatly changed.

There is only one thing now that can stop Ukraine shedding
its old Soviet skin and emerging as a European state – the Moscow-backed insurgency in the
east. But all is far from lost on that front. While it is true that the country’s
easternmost oblasts are currently wracked with lawlessness and violence, Kyiv
has managed to contain the separatists, preventing the spread of instability to
other vulnerable regions, and even managing to turn back the secessionist tide
in Kharkiv oblast. The anti-terrorist operation, despite some setbacks and a
dreadful cost in lives, is gaining momentum and winning back ground. If control
of the borders in Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts can be restored, the insurgents
will be surrounded, and their rebellion slowly strangled.

But after winning back the land in the east, Kyiv will then
have to win back the minds of the people in the east, which have been deliberately
and systematically poisoned against it. To do that will require those in the
eastern regions to become properly acquainted with the national idea that has
formed in the rest of Ukraine.

This need not be as hard as it might sound. Whenever the
people of the east are asked whether they want to remain as part of Ukraine,
the majority say “yes” (this was even the case in Crimea.) They are as sick of
the corruption, the money-politics, the stagnation and the despair that has
plagued Ukraine since independence as everyone else in the county is. It’s just
that to cure it, they looked to the past, to the Soviet system, rather than to
the future, to Europe. It will take time to turn them around, but it can be
done.

So long after the last shots are fired in the Donbas
insurgency, Ukraine will still be battling away to win back the hearts and
minds of its eastern population. It will need its new national idea to bind its
wounds and draw out the venom pumped into it by Russia. It will need the European
Union to nurture the country’s Europeanness with financial and political
support. Brussels must provide this, not just because the fractious EU itself also
needs Ukraine’s national idea to maintain its own unity, but simply because now
Ukraine IS Europe: it is an idea, and as the Ukrainians have shown, it is an
idea that people will fight for.